Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions Page 22

  The drumbeat of war was growing louder. What else was there for her, if she didn’t go to France?

  40

  CONSTANCE RETURNED FROM a walk to the druggist, having gone in search of a mustard plaster for Providencia Monafo’s cough, and found Norma waiting at the prisoners’ entrance. Constance thought wearily that this was the second time in a week that she’d turned up at the jail.

  What, she wondered, was stirring Norma into such unexpected and uncharacteristic action? It stood to reason that Fleurette’s sudden departure (she refused to call it a disappearance) would cause Constance no end of worry—she, having borne the child for nine months and run away in secret to bring her into the world, had more than a sisterly interest in her well-being. She worried about Fleurette—she would never stop worrying about her, naturally—but her occupation demanded that she look at the matter from the perspective of a woman of the law. Through the eyes of her profession, Fleurette had done nothing wrong. Constance believed it only right to adopt that view.

  Norma, on the other hand, had seized upon Fleurette’s situation and worried the life out of it, like a dog with its prey. She was often like that when she got hold of something she considered unjust or improper, but never before had she taken one of her causes so far. Constance had grown to count on Norma to be that domestic presence who sat in the parlor and disapproved of things. She did not, however, like to find Norma disapproving of things at her place of employment and wished she knew how to discourage the habit.

  “I don’t know why you wait around out here,” Constance called to her from the end of the drive. “The guards would’ve let you wait inside.”

  “I worry for anyone who finds the inside of a jail comfortable.”

  “I worry for you, coming into Hackensack the way you do. I don’t recognize you off the farm. It’s like seeing a goat in town.”

  “Goats have more business in Hackensack than you might believe.” Norma said things like that because she had to have the last word on any subject, but particularly on the subject of farm animals.

  Constance looked over her sister with a feeling of discouragement. Norma had pinned on an old green felt hat of their mother’s and wrapped around her neck a red and white knitted scarf that their brother, Francis, had worn when he was a boy. Below that was a tweed riding suit bearing multiple patches, and the boots she wore to muck out the barn. It had the overall effect of a disguise rather than a suit of clothes, and Constance told her so. Norma ignored that and reached into her pocket.

  “We’ve had another postcard from Fleurette, but that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Let me see it.” As Norma didn’t seem to want to go inside, Constance led her to the garage, where they could be out of the wind and ensured of some sort of privacy. The mechanic had just left, and the wood stove still had a few sticks burning.

  The postcard showed a hotel in Allentown with a theater next door. On the reverse she’d written:

  I hadn’t any idea the Dresden Dolls were so thoroughly adored! Last night an admirer of May Ward’s took us all out for lobster bordelaise—if you can imagine it—but you can’t because we’ve never had lobster for dinner—nor have you ever tasted Roman punch, but I have—only a sip! Frau Ironsides had it taken away and ginger ale brought in its place, but in Champagne glasses so we could pretend.

  F.

  “She’s torturing us with that talk of Roman punch, but I’m not going to let myself be bothered by it.” Constance handed the card back to Norma.

  “I’m not here over the postcard,” Norma said impatiently.

  “Then what is it?”

  She thrust out a rolled-up headline. It was exactly the sort of thing she liked to tie to the leg of a pigeon and send home, except that Constance wasn’t at home. Pigeons couldn’t be trained to deliver messages to the jail unless they’d been raised there, a possibility that Constance very much hoped would never occur to her.

  KIDNAPPED GIRL FORCED TO WRITE LETTERS

  As it was only the headline, cut out with pinking shears, Constance had no choice but to say, “Aren’t you going to show me the rest?”

  Norma pulled it from her pocket. “It concerns a girl who was drugged with chloroform at a train station.” Here she paused and lifted an eyebrow in anticipation of Constance’s response.

  “Yes, I heard you. You needn’t make a dramatic recitation out of this.” (Only one year earlier, Fleurette had been threatened with just such a kidnapping. It was not an incident that Constance was ever likely to forget, but Norma thought it her grim duty to remind her of it at any opportunity.)

  Norma lifted the clipping to better see it through her spectacles and continued. “She was taken away to Chicago, but made to write to her parents as if she’d only run off to visit an aunt in Rochester. The kidnappers contrived to have the letters smuggled by train to Rochester to be posted.”

  “Very clever, those white slavers.”

  “She was gone for a year. After she escaped, she said that she’d tried to conceal secret messages in the letters, but no one in her family noticed them.”

  “What sort of messages?”

  “Having the first letter of each line spell out C-H-I-C-A-G-O and so forth.” Norma made it sound like Constance was out of step for not knowing such tricks.

  “I’ve never known Fleurette to go in for secret code. You’re the one they should kidnap. You’d send back all kinds of codes and hidden messages.”

  “You wouldn’t know what to do with a hidden message if I sent one.”

  “I don’t even know what to do with this newspaper story, so I suppose you’re right. If you mean to suggest that Fleurette is only sending these notes under some sort of threat from kidnappers—well, I just can’t go along with that.”

  Norma buttoned her collar up under her neck and made ready to leave. “That’s fine, because I’ve already taken care of it.”

  “How?” Already Norma was walking away. Constance followed her outside and waved away a guard who’d been sent downstairs to fetch her. She practically had to shout, as Norma was walking so fast.

  “Norma!” Constance called. “What did you do?”

  She turned around and fluttered her hand in the air a bit regally. “I turned the matter over to Belle Headison.”

  41

  NORMA AND BELLE HEADISON as co-conspirators! How had this been brought about? They’d never been introduced, so far as Constance knew, but she must’ve said something about Mrs. Headison at home, Paterson’s first policewoman being a noteworthy topic. Still, it was astonishing that Norma would take it upon herself to go and visit anyone for any purpose, much less to enlist the help of a perfect stranger in a family matter.

  Although as Constance considered it, she had to admit that the two were almost a perfect match. Norma couldn’t be bothered to muster Mrs. Headison’s sense of moral outrage over the generalized threat to virtuous womanhood that lingered in the air, but she more than outpaced Mrs. Headison in vigilance and suspicion of individual shady characters.

  Norma, in other words, had no moral mission, other than to identify those particular parties whom she found lacking and to gather evidence against them—particularly when they interfered with her family. Mrs. Headison, on the other hand, ran a crusade. Put together, they were a dangerous combination.

  It was also true that Mrs. Headison was altogether stiff and rigid in her way of thinking, and believed that the best answer for every girl was to be picked up by the scruff of the neck and delivered back home to her mother, to resume her crochet-work and laundry duties. She had little sympathy for a girl who wanted anything else. If Edna Heustis had fallen into the custody of Mrs. Headison, she surely would have been made to resign her position at the powder works and return home to her mother.

  And now, thanks to Norma, Fleurette had become Mrs. Headison’s latest target. Constance wouldn’t wish that fate on any girl, much less her own.

  It was conniving of Norma, Constance thought, to make such an annou
ncement and then walk away, stomping down the gravel drive toward the approaching trolley car, when she knew that Constance was needed at work and couldn’t chase after her. The reason the guard had been sent to fetch her was that a woman had just been arrested on a swindling charge, and it fell to Constance to register her, put her through the bathing and de-lousing ritual, and issue her a clean set of clothes.

  She would’ve put the guard off and run over to Paterson to speak to Belle Headison that minute, but apparently the inmate was kicking up quite a fuss and none of the other guards wanted to listen to her. Constance had no choice but to put that business aside and tend to her duties. The swindler thought she might fight Constance over the removal of her clothes and the humiliation of a jailhouse shower, but she soon found herself outmatched and submitted to a vigorous scrubbing and a caustic hair rinse. “I suppose it’s for everyone’s good if the bugs are got rid of,” the swindler muttered, and Constance praised her for her community spirit.

  As soon as she had the inmate settled, she went directly to speak to Mrs. Headison but found her office empty. A note pinned to the door said she wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day. Constance’s shift at the jail was over by then, so there was nothing to do but to go home and face Norma.

  Constance found her next to the barn, tossing pigeons in the air. Her friend Carolyn Borus was standing across the road, watching them flutter up into the sky, circle around, and come back to land on the roof of their loft.

  Mrs. Borus had arrived by horseback. She wore a smart riding costume and high boots. Her chestnut bay nibbled at a pile of hay behind the barn.

  “Your sister has the most remarkable ideas!” she shouted to Constance.

  “Yes, I’ve been noticing that lately,” Constance called back.

  Mrs. Borus scrambled out of the little gully alongside the road and walked over. “She believes she can predict the fastest flyers by watching their flight pattern as they take off. Have you ever heard of such a thing? She’s been keeping records for weeks now. We’ll know for certain when we run our test flights, but I think she’s onto something.”

  Norma reached into the pigeon loft, took two more birds in her hands, and tossed them up. This time neither Carolyn nor Norma bothered to watch their flight.

  “Those two are slow, but it’s only fair to let them try,” Carolyn explained.

  “How are yours faring under this system, Mrs. Borus?” Constance asked.

  “Oh, very well. I’m about to leave for Columbus for our next test flight. And then it’s Chicago after that. I wish you could persuade your sister to come along. It isn’t easy to manage a dozen pigeons by myself.”

  “If I go, there’s no one to give an accurate time when my birds return,” Norma said. “Constance is never at home. Even if she was, her timekeeping is unreliable.”

  “That’s true,” said Constance. “I shouldn’t be trusted with a pigeon clock.” She had long ago understood that the only way to be dismissed from pigeon duty was to make a mess of the timekeeping. It was wonderfully effective: Norma never asked her to do it anymore.

  Mrs. Borus took her horse from around back and led it down the drive. “I’m leaving on Friday. You have time to change your mind.”

  After she rode away, Constance followed her sister into the barn. Norma took up a rake and started mucking out the chicken coop.

  “I don’t know what made you think Mrs. Headison should get involved in any of this,” Constance said to her, now that pigeons and trains were no longer their topic of conversation.

  “She seemed quite willing,” Norma said.

  “But she’s a Paterson policewoman. We might not know exactly where Fleurette is, but she’s certainly not in Paterson.”

  Norma pushed a wheelbarrow of feathers and old pine bedding out the door and deposited it on what was to be their summer vegetable garden. “It doesn’t matter where Fleurette happens to be. Mrs. Headison has friends in every city. She has only to wire the Travelers’ Aid Society at each stop on the tour and ask them to keep an eye on May Ward’s theater company. They’re all too happy to do it, those women. They love an assignment.”

  The idea of a Belle Headison in every city across America gave Constance a case of nerves. “But they’re not to follow her around and watch her every move, are they? They’ve been given the general idea that a theater troupe is in town and that they might be on the alert . . .” She trailed off, as the likelihood of her version of events seemed ever more remote.

  “Oh, no,” Norma said as she pushed the empty wheelbarrow back into the barn. “They’ve taken up the assignment with tremendous enthusiasm. They’re going to attend every show, and watch at the stage door, and keep an eye on the hotels, too.”

  “Norma, you didn’t! Why have you let Freeman Bernstein set you off like this? I never thought I’d be the one to defend a man like him, or to stand up in favor of Fleurette’s going off with a vaudeville troupe, but that’s exactly what’s happened, isn’t it? You put me on the opposite side of this. You, and now Mrs. Headison. I’m going right over there tomorrow to insist that she call this off.”

  “Go ahead and try,” Norma said. “She won’t be called off. She’s a woman of principles.”

  Norma went over to the barn stove’s metal chimney and pounded on it, which released a great cloud of ash all around her. “I thought so,” she muttered, and went to work clearing the chimney and sweeping up the ashes.

  Constance stood looking down at her, at her broadcloth overalls smeared in mud and dusted in wood shavings, at the back of her head, where her hair stood up in a mess of brown curls, and at her heavy shoulders, working the short-handled broom.

  There was a song Fleurette used to sing, a man’s song, about how some wives were like anchors and others like balloons. It occurred to her that the same must be true of sisters.

  She had never once thought of Norma as a balloon.

  Was she an anchor? She felt like one, at that moment. She even looked like one.

  42

  THE NEXT MORNING, Constance went directly back to Mrs. Headison’s office, fueled by indignation and the wild uncertain fear that Fleurette would discover what Norma had done and turn her back on them for good. It seemed inevitable that their time together was coming to an end. Fleurette was eighteen and would find work for herself or find a husband, or perhaps one and then the other, but in any case, she wouldn’t want to live with her sisters forever.

  Constance was only just starting to realize what that meant. It meant that she and Norma would be alone, just the two of them. There was no future for Constance that didn’t have Norma in it. The thought of it made her glum and broody.

  It was in this state of mind that she arrived at the Paterson Travelers’ Aid Office and at last found Belle Headison there, banging at a typewriter. She sat straight as a ruler, perched on the very end of a little wooden stool on wheels, with her silver hair in one of those spartan buns that pulled at her ears and at the corners of her eyes.

  She jumped up when she saw Constance. She was a tightly wound, energetic woman who always seemed about to break into a run. She spoke too loudly and stood too close. Constance was forever backing away from her.

  “Deputy!” She rushed over to take her hands. “I had the pleasure of meeting your sister, and now you’ve come to pay me a visit. How many more Kopps are there, apart from the girl who’s gone astray?”

  “She hasn’t gone astray,” Constance said. “And we have a married brother in Hawthorne, but I don’t suppose you’ll run into him.”

  “The Kopp intelligence in a man. That is something I’d like to see. Or did your mother save it all for the girls and forget to keep any for the boy? I know some families like that.”

  “Francis does just fine. But I’ve come to apologize for my sister Norma. I’m afraid she’s sent your colleagues off on a frivolous errand.”

  Mrs. Headison gave a little gasp. “Frivolous? Not at all! If she’s fallen in with the theater crowd, there’s no gue
ssing what might happen. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the primary sources of moral decay in this country are the theaters, the dance halls, and the saloons. Those girls are left to run amok and—well, you know all about the trouble they get into. Every night when the play is over, there are calls for dates and you know very well the class of men from whom they come. The girl in this situation finds it difficult to keep her honor behind the footlights. The stage atmosphere makes for a loose holding of the bonds of virtue.”

  Mrs. Headison was a little winded after that speech, and so was Constance. There was no talking her out of her opinions. Constance knew better than to try.

  “It is distressing what can happen,” she said, “but today I’m only here about one particular girl, and that is Fleurette. I’m afraid Norma gave you the wrong impression. She hasn’t fallen in with a bad crowd, or put herself in harm’s way. I’ve always told her that she has every right to go out and find work for herself, and that’s exactly what she’s done. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “I was made to understand that she snuck away, under cover of night,” Mrs. Headison said.

  “It doesn’t matter when she left, or how. She writes home faithfully and we have every reason to believe that she’s safe. I don’t want her thinking that we’ve set a gang of spies upon her, and I certainly don’t want to put the ladies at the Travelers’ Aid Societies through any extra difficulty on our account. You may let them know that the concerns over May Ward’s theater troupe are unfounded, and that we have no reason at all to suspect anything untoward.”

  Mrs. Headison looked a little crestfallen at that. “Nothing at all untoward?”

  “No. I’m so sorry she bothered you. If you would just put out a wire —”

  Suddenly Belle seemed to have a new idea. “But your sister was under the impression that Miss Fleurette was being pursued by a show promoter who wants to put her on the stage and exploit an unfortunate scandal at whose center the three of you found yourselves last year. I thought I’d be doing all of you a favor.”